You know what you want and say it does not matter. You feel the no rising and swallow it. You are tired and stay anyway, hurt and smile anyway, certain and defer anyway. From the outside this looks like flexibility, even kindness. From the inside, repeated over years, it is something else: a long quiet practice of leaving yourself, conducted so smoothly that you stopped noticing the door.
Self-abandonment is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a pattern name used in therapy and recovery circles for a recognizable cluster: dismissing your own feelings, overriding your own needs, breaking promises to yourself that you would never break to others, and treating your inner signals as interruptions rather than information. The word abandonment is doing precise work in the name. There is a self in there, and it keeps being left at the exact moments it asks for something.
The pattern is learned, usually early and reasonably. A child whose feelings inconvenienced the household learns that having needs costs connection. A child praised only for being easy learns that the lovable version of them is the one with nothing of their own. Abandoning yourself first, before anyone else can be bothered by you, is a survival strategy in that environment. The problem is the strategy outlives the environment, and an adult keeps paying a tax that no one is collecting anymore.
The daily mechanics are small enough to miss. Saying it is fine when it is not, hunger and tiredness pushed past as a matter of routine, opinions sanded down before speaking, plans you wanted dissolved the moment someone else preferred otherwise. Each instance is trivial. The accumulation is not. Trust between you and yourself erodes exactly the way it erodes between two people, through repeated small betrayals, until your own preferences stop announcing themselves, because experience taught them no one was coming.
This is the stage people describe as not knowing what they want anymore, or feeling like a stranger in their own life. It is not a mystery and not a midlife defect. A signal ignored long enough goes quiet. The wanting did not die. It stopped reporting to a management that never listened.
What helps begins absurdly small, because the relationship being repaired is real and repairs start with reliability, not grand gestures. Notice one preference a day and honor it, the food you actually want, the earlier night, the no that is true. Keep one small promise to yourself daily, kept promises are how trust rebuilds in any relationship, including this one. When the old reflex fires, the instant it is fine forms in your mouth, pause one breath and check whether it is. Sometimes it is. The pause is the point, because the pause is you, staying.
None of this requires becoming selfish, and the fear that it does is the old training talking. People who stop abandoning themselves do not love others less. They just stop paying for every connection with their own absence, and what remains is the strange new experience of being somewhere, fully, including with yourself.